Prose by Annika Lee

Edited by Cynthia Wang

I still remember the first time you saw me. I think I will always remember, even as I draw my dying breaths. 

When we were in elementary school, you were so vibrant that you drew everyone’s eye. Once, someone called you pretty as a flower, their voice thick with awe, and the simile stuck. We compared you to a flower when you couldn’t hear, not because we thought you would have taken offense, but because we dared not speak to you.

When you spoke, we all leaned in to listen. Your voice was like a rushing brook, like tinkling bells, like everything that pleased the ear. But you always sounded so distant, so removed from us, like you were deigning to speak with us mortals. Everyone wanted to take you by the hand and draw you close. Deep down, I think we were all half in love with you. 

I was a nobody. People’s eyes skipped over me. They looked, but did not see me. Not the mousy kid in the corner with scrawny limbs and a tiny voice. When the older kids pushed me down, I stayed there. Nobody would come to help a kid whose name slipped their mind after ten minutes, and I learned that they grew bored easily if I didn’t react. 

But the day you first saw me, they kept kicking. I tucked my knees to my chest, my body a terrified curve. I knew nobody would tell them to stop. Who remembered me? Who saw the body on the ground surrounded by boys a head taller than me?

You did.

“Hey,” you said, then, your voice steady as you hurried towards the ring of boys around me. “Stop that.” 

You pushed your way through, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me to my feet. I hid behind you while you pinned them in place with a thorny glare. They looked down and shuffled their feet, cowed. In contrast, with your shoulders thrown back and your chin lifted, you seemed like a warrior, like a shining knight.

With a solemnity that shocked me to come from someone my age, you declared, “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” Their faces flushed red, and you dragged me away. 

You let go when we were far enough from them that their figures were blurry and indistinguishable and turned your piercing gaze upon me. I felt cored out, like you had reached your hand into my chest and scooped out my still-beating heart to study it. My bullies must have felt the same, I thought, though they must have been examined and found wanting.

“You know,” you said, your eyes softening so quickly and completely that I thought I imagined their earlier sharpness, “you ought to say something back to them. I can’t fathom why you would let them do that to you. You’re certainly smart enough to make them stop.” With that, you floated away, like you were walking on clouds. 

That was the first time you saw me, and the first time that anybody really did.

In the here and now, you laugh, not looking at me. “Did I really say that?”

I nod, watching you through the mirror. Your eyes flick to mine then away. You, with your once-piercing gaze, the one now too hesitant to hold mine for longer than a second. What did you see in me, then? What do you see now, when you look upon my reflection? What do you see when you look upon your own?

You drag your comb through your long hair. You haven’t cut it ever, except for slight trims to take care of any split ends. When you stand, it falls to your waist in a waterfall. 

“Wow,” you say, with a forced laugh, “I barely remember that.”

“Yeah, well. It happened.”

“It happened,” you say, softly, neither a question nor agreement. 

It happened, like everything after that did, sent us careening through the years to end up here—you, in front of your mirror, combing your hair. Me, on your bed, watching you. In all the years that have passed, that is the one thing that hasn’t changed: my eyes on you. 

“You know,” I say, breaking the silence blooming between us, “everyone used to say you were like a flower.”

“A flower?”

“Everything you had was covered in them. You remember, right? Your pencil case, your hairbands, your backpack. And, well, you know. You always seemed so perfect. Untouchable. Not like the rest of us.” I sigh, wistful. I can still see the you from years ago, so fierce and strong and unbroken. 

A melancholic smile grows on your lips, but your voice is bitingly sardonic, and it breaks the spell. “Perfect? As if. No one’s perfect, least of all me.” 

Then, before I can reply, without warning, you say, “I feel like cutting my hair. What do you think?”

I shrug. “Up to you.”

You fall silent, playing with the ends of your hair. The fan in the corner of your room wheezes a dying breath. You sigh, reach over, and hit it with a open hand. It judders and jerks, but coughs back to life, pivoting and blowing a cool breeze through the room.

You look down at the mess on your table. For a second, your expression cracks open like a cage, something heartbreaking and melancholic passing over your features. Then you look up, and you look the same as you always do. 

“If I were like a flower,” you say, suddenly, your voice piercing the silence like a thorn, “I’d be like that flower. Dead.” You jerk your chin at your windowsill to point at the dying orchid. Wrinkled petals cover the soil and its bare stem droops. Its leaves are yellowed and shriveled. 

I walk to the flower, trail my fingers over the leaves. They’re paper-thin and dry against my fingertips. I could crush them if I breathed on them wrong. You don’t look at me as you pick up the hairbrush to continue combing your hair. I want to catch your eye in the mirror, but I know you won’t look at me. So all I do is sit back down on your bed, the light blue sheets crumpling under my weight. Even now, I’m not as bold and brave as you were, years ago. 

“No. You were so full of life back then. None of us could compare.” I pause. “And then, of course,” I say, before remembering that I shouldn’t continue. The reason for your change is a sensitive subject, even after all these years.

“And then, of course,” you say, mockingly, and you have no such compunctions to fall silent, so you finish what I started, “my mother died.”

Yes, and you stopped raising your hand in class and looking people in the eye. 

And your voice rang not with bells, but with sorrow. Your eyes no longer saw down to the heart of people—they needed to focus. You needed to stop walking around with your head in the clouds and plant your feet on the ground like the rest of us. 

“No,” I say instead. “And then I realized you were like me.” 

Years ago, when we were kids, nobody ever dared to brush past your clothes. But now you were jostled and carried with the flow of people in the halls. That day, someone shoved you hard into the lockers while I was passing by. 

“Can’t you watch where you’re going? Freak,” they spat, before disappearing into the crowd.

You flinched. For a second, I saw my younger self cringing away from relentless kicks. Then I blinked, and you were left standing there, your shoulders hunched and chin dipped towards your chest.

I pushed my own way through the crowd, planted myself in front of you. “What did you say?” I asked, glaring at everyone who avoided my gaze. Behind me, you trembled like a leaf in the wind.

Nobody spoke. 

You tugged my shirt, a silent plea. With one last scathing glare, I pulled you away.

“It’s nearly class,” you said, quietly, stumbling over your feet. 

But I kept walking, out the doors, away from the throngs of people. I brought you to the dark space under the bleachers and held your hands in mine. Your hands were roughened with the years. 

“Hey,” I said, trying to meet your eyes, “Are you alright?”

You stared at the ground. In the low lighting, I saw a single tear race down your cheek. Then you swallowed and looked up at me, eyes glimmering.

“What does it matter to you?” you finally said, voice so soft I could barely hear you. “You don’t know me. Why do you care?”

I shrugged, then. Said nothing. It was true: I didn’t know you. I’d spoken to you once before. Certainly I could not call you a friend. But then again, neither could anyone else. All I could do was stand there, squeezing your hands between mine and hope the touch would bring you comfort. 

If you asked me that question now, I would say that I cared for you the way you cared for me back then. So fierce and strong that you marched up to children taller and stronger than you and demanded they stop kicking a kid you didn’t know. You didn’t have to know me to care for me; I don’t have to know you to care for you. 

You’re silent for a while after I finish, still dragging your comb through your hair. It crackles with static. “No,” you say, finally, “I’m not like you. You’re stronger than I am.”

I shake my head. “You were always the strong one.”

“Maybe once, but not now.”

I hesitate before speaking again. I don’t want to pry, but I do want to know. “What happened to you?”

You put your hairbrush down with a click, bracing your wrists on the edge of the table like the words hurt you to say. “What happens to all of us? Life happened. We grew up. The difference is that I broke, you didn’t.” You pause, then continue quieter, looking down and away. “Sometimes I think I’m still breaking.”

I try to meet your eyes in the mirror, but you blink and look away. “I think you’re stronger than you know.”

A sad smile tugs at your lips. You hum noncommittally, not responding.

“You’re not like that orchid,” I say, leaning in, trying to make you understand. “I don’t think you’ve broken. You’re still just like a blooming flower. Maybe you’re a little, I don’t know, droopy, but you haven’t died. Not yet.”

“No. If I were a flower,” you say, picking up the scissors on your desk and staring your reflection dead in the eye, “I’d kill myself before I died.”

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Artist Statement: “Life, Crumbling” was originally written in response to the prompt “efflorescence,” which is defined as a state or time of blooming. It is supposed to be a time of success and beauty, one filled with life. But the unnamed “you” must instead grapple with what happens after such a time ends, while the narrator moves forward into their own time of blooming. The piece explores the ways in which we grow up and lose ourselves in the process. Sometimes, time deals us wounds instead of healing them. The piece blurs the edges of past and present as the narrator tells the unnamed “you” their perspective on them. The future, however, is deliberately left open. Just as flowers open each spring, perhaps “you” will once again bloom.